I'm working on creating a complete task list and timeline for my game project and of course, google doc spreadsheets only get you so far, so I'm looking for recommendations of what other people use. I am considering an agile SCRUM-based development plan.

At my old company we used to use Mantis Bugtracker which was great for bugs, time estimates and assigning tasks, but not really good for timelines or overall planning. There's also OnTime geared for SCRUM, perfect pick, but it's a paid option with a trial.

Anything else? Basically looking for something to create tasks/"user stories" with description, category (code, audio, graphics, writing etc.), estimated time and maybe few extra fields (priority? optional), and then arrange them on an a timeline maybe on a per-week basis. And, of course, tick-off when a task is done. Users and task-assignmen would be nice but not essential (can be just mentioned in description, it's a small project).

I started using pivotaltracker a few weeks ago for my (solo) project. I really like it so far.

Pros:

Easy to use web interface. Almost fun to do scheduling.

Designed for agile development, with a focus on completing short iterations with measurable progress.

You assign points to features representing how long you guess they'll take. The units don't really matter, pivotaltracker monitors how many points you complete per iteration (e.g., week) and then plans out the schedule accordingly.

Easy to organize features into categories and milestones using labels.

Free for single devs.

Cons:

It doesn't work for all development styles (although I do think it is well suited to most game development styles).

Reasons for the fork are here and some googling turned up a differences page here.

In my experience, I switched over to ChiliProject a few months after the fork for keeping track of my own personal projects and the primary differences I've seen are:

Much easier to maintain and upgrade your ChiliProject instance (probably due to the cleaner code base, especially once they got their 3.0 line up and running).

If you are on 3.0, the GUI has been redesigned and I personally like it much better. Though both are very good usability-wise.

And that's all I've noticed. I don't use many plugins nor do I have any complicated projects so any other differences between the two projects haven't popped up in my use case. But I have heard people say that not all plugins work in ChiliProject so depending on what you end up needing, Redmine may be better for you.

Lastly, just to be complete and to further muddle decisions on what to use, there is actually a fork of ChiliProject / Redmine that is more focused on business needs (still open source I believe) called OpenProject. You can read about OpenProject's differences here.

The best scrum board if you aren't in a distributed team is an actual, physical whiteboard. Buy a bunch of 5x3 index cards for stories, color-coded post-its for tasks and blocking issues, and you're golden.

OK so I checked everything out and none of it is quite what I need - basically, a fairly customizable or project-geared virtual notecard board.

Trello - good for creating and managing tasks BUT majorly lacks in terms of task customiziation (no tags, only 6 pre-defined labels, no custom fields, no time estimates)

ChilliProject / Redmine / Track / Mantis - good for task creation and assignment, but lacking in terms of timelining, grouping and visualization. Cumbersome to use for non-coders, and in some cases requires Ruby

PivotalTracker - almost exactly what I need, except it automatically forces tasks into sprints based on its own estimates, which wouldn't be too bad if it had support for separate departments (right now a sprint treats all tasks equally even if they are done by different people at different velocities)

GanntProject - nice graphic capabilities but becomes really cumbersome with many tasks spread across a long timeline (numerous weeks/sprints); not easy to "move" tasks around or customize them. Plus, mainly desktop non-collaborative solution

Jira + Grasshopper - looks good too but also isn't free so holding off on that for the time being. I got a webserver but couldnt host their flat-fee solution myself (no spare PC that can run reliable 24/7).

I think I'll stick to Trello for the time being and as the needs grow maybe consider Jira?

The coolest ever management tool i heard of was a flag pole in front of company's office. When they fail at something (like nightly automated build&test gone wrong), they gather at the pole and got their flag down a feet. When they did it good, they collectively raise it.